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January 20, 2012

I don't really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It's just my experience. All I've got to put in a song is my own experience.

The same is true of fiction. Songs and stories are powerful ways of communicating, but literature with an agenda is almost always bad literature, stories with a message are almost always shallow morality tales, and the fables that now pepper popular non-fiction books are often particularly egregious examples. Thomas Friedman's taxi drivers and Malcolm Gladwell's hush puppies are the 21st-century template for books on management, business, economics, politics, and technology only because even badly-told stories seduce us.

Whenever I encounter a story in a non-fiction book my guard goes up, whether it's fictional or a retelling of an actual event. I know that I am being presented with a Trojan horse; there's a message hidden inside and the only reason for telling me the story is to sneak that message past my defenses of scepticism and logic. It's a trick, and critical readers must reject it. At some point the tables will turn and the telling of non-fiction tales will be recognized as the dishonest, slippery tactic that it is, but for now we must simply resist them and the invading armies that they are smuggling. Which makes it all the more surprising that I loved Sherry Turkle's Alone Together, because it is full of stories.

More precisely, I loved the first half of the book, devoted to observing how humans react to robots that react to humans. In Part Two she observes humans reacting to other humans through the medium of digital networks and is less successful. Her use of stories is one reason why Part One works and Part Two fails, so lets stay with the robots and Part One for now.

First, if you are going to use stories you might as well tell them well and Turkle does so. She has an eye for a telling phrase that sets her apart from most non-fiction writers. From a robot that "develops its own origami of lovemaking positions" to the titles and subtitles of the book, she coins phrases that evoke the contradictions and tensions that are her subjects. "Alone together", "The robotic moment: in solitude, new intimacies", "Networked: in intimacy, new solitudes".

Second, the stories are not archetypes conjured up simply to illustrate a point, but emerge from the extensive observational work Turkle has done: more than 700 interviews over 30 years, decades of bringing robots to schools and nursing homes, sending them home with children for weeks at a time, watching participants interact with robots and watching herself also. "I think of the product as an intimate ethnography" she writes {xiii} and the credibility of the book comes from this longstanding and far-reaching work.

More importantly, in Part One she uses stories to provoke questions, rather than to provide answers. Consider two examples.

Early on, Turkle writes of visiting the American Museum of Natural History with her then-teenaged daughter Rebecca. They approach an exhibit of two giant tortoises from the Galapagos Islands. Rebecca looks at the one visible, motionless, creature and declares "They could have used a robot".

Turkle was taken aback, and started a discussion with other parents and children in the line-up. Several of the children shared Rebecca's concern for the animal and her unimpressed reaction to its authenticity: it would be better for the tortoise itself not to have been brought all this way; a robot would not make the water dirty; "for what they do, you didn't have to have the live ones." The parents disagree: "The point is that they are real. That's the whole point."

What I like is that the story does not deliver a message, but instead prompts questions in the mind of the reader. In this way, despite its factual origin, the story is more fictional/literary than many. Does authenticity matter? If so, under what circumstances, and why? It's the open-ended nature of the event that makes reading Alone Together an active, questioning experience, and one I found very rich.

That's not to say Turkle doesn't have a message to deliver. She does, and she is clear enough about what it is: "I am a psychoanalytically trained psychologist. By both temperament and profession, I place high value on relationships of intimacy and authenticity." {6} The book is about Turkle's increasing concern, after years of enthusiasm, that social technologies are serving to erode these qualities.

The second story is one that has stayed with me because it gets right to the heart of the issues the book raises around authenticity {74}. Visiting Japan in the early 1990s, Turkle heard tales of adult children who, too distant and too busy to visit their aging and infirm parents, hired actors to visit in their stead, playing the part of the adult child. What's more, the parents appreciated and enjoyed the gesture. It's slightly shocking to western sensibilities, but once we hear a little more context it becomes more understandable.

First, the actors are not (in all cases, at least) a deception: the parents recognize them for what they are. Yet the parents "enjoyed the company and played the game". In Japan, being elderly is a role, being a child is a role, and parental visits have a strong dose of ritual to them: the recital of scripts by each party. While the child may not be able to act out their role, at least this way the parent gets to enact theirs, and so to reinforce their identity as an elderly, respected person.

The story, again, provokes questions in the mind of the reader rather than leading us to a staged conclusion: questions about authenticity, when it matters, and why. Turkle's reaction was "if you are willing to send an actor, why not send a robot?" If it does not matter that the visitor is really a child does it matter if the visitor is really a visitor? Does it matter if the visitor is not really visiting (a phone call)? Or why, as my wife asked, should we see this as less than a visit when we could see it instead as more than a bunch of flowers?

To me, the story and the questions it prompts undermine my confidence in my own judgements: to make me realise that they are more tied up with cultural conventions, more arbitrary and more shallow, than I thought. And if prompting reflection is the point, then that's OK because the story is, again, open ended: it is not hiding a pre-planned answer.

Part Two of Alone Together fails because Turkle's interviews and observations focus on bringing out our discontents (new solitudes) with networking technologies. She has a message, and it's one we can either agree with or argue with, but by approaching this part in terms of discontents she fails to escape being didactic. The slogans have not dissolved, in Cohen's words.

Part One succeeds because it explores the "new intimacies": what is surprisingly seductive about interacting with even the most crude and obviously artificial robots. It's this seduction that is so unsettling: the notion that things are "alive enough" for a given kind of relationship; that the most powerful thing a robot can do is to have needs which we can meet.

There is something of a taboo against robots in Western societies. In the last few years we have grown to accept human-sounding artificial voices (the iPhone's Siri being the latest) but we shy away from artifical human appearance. We permit robots as toys and vacuum cleaners, but their use as companions for the aged or as visible service employees is still outside the realm of the every day (at least for now). Interacting with a visible robot is still a novel experience for those of us outside childhood, and so Part One of Alone Together has a sense of a report from a slightly alien future. What she shows us is how vulnerable we are to the seductions of even the most crude simulations, and for unexpected reasons, and the disquiet this provokes is something worth reflecting on. Taboos are vulnerable to suddenly being washed away, and the technological imperative may yet carry us forward into a world where robots are more commonly present. I share Turkle's concern about what impact that will have. More on that next time.

January 14, 2012

Doing some reading after up my recent post on Ethan Zuckerman's "Cute Cats" talk I came across this post by Sarah Kendzior at registan.net. I know roughly nothing about the places and events she discusses, but it is a fascinating post by an obviously knowledgeable person, and the comments thread following it is one of the most absorbing I've ever read. Lots of people have great things to add, and they do so in a constructive and generous way.

January 13, 2012

I just read Sherry Turkle's excellent and provocative Alone Together and I plan to put up four wordy posts about it here, more "inspired by" than "review of", which will probably take me a month or so. Does anyone want to join in, either at your own blog or here, to make it a conversation instead of a monologue? If so, either leave a comment or by email (here).

January 05, 2012

Table of Contents

Cory Doctorow (*) and Jillian York (*) were both full of praise for Ethan Zuckerman's Vancouver Human Rights Lecture on Cute Cats and the Arab Spring (*), so I listened to the podcast from CBC's Ideas (*). You can also watch the lecture on YouTube (*).

Ethan Zuckerman (EZ) has a long and admirable history of involvement in digital activism and a wide knowledge of both technology and social change; the lecture is worth an hour of your time. But (you knew there was a but) in the end I have to disagree with his main thesis.

1 Dry Tunisian Tinder

EZ tells us how, after years of sporadic and failed protests in Tunisia, one particular spark in the city of Sidi Bouzid blossomed into the forest fire of revolution. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at official interference with his vegetable stall it was a dramatic and desperate act, but not unique: he wasn't the first person to do so even that year. What was different this time?

EZ's argument is that digital social media was different. The early protest was captured on video using a cheap phone and posted to a social networking site where… it did NOT "go viral". Instead the video was picked up by Tunisians outside the country (including EZ's friend Sami ben Gharbia1), who were scanning Tunisian web content for political news and curating it on a site called nawaat.org (*).

Al Jazeera got the video from nawaat.org and broadcast it back into Tunisia; Tunisians found out in turn what was going on from Al Jazeera. What's important here, says EZ, is that the new low-cost participatory media is an essential part of a larger media ecosystem that helped to stir up feelings within Tunisia.

2 Cute Cats and Malaysian Opposition

In the 1990s EZ ran a web site called Tripod for college/university students. Surprisingly, many people used it not for the Worthy Purposes he and his colleagues had planned, but to share simple and casual things, like pictures of cute cats. Also surprisingly, some of the heaviest use came from Malaysia. Wondering what was going on, Zuckerman got the Malay content translated, only to find that his site was hosting the Malaysian opposition Reformasi movement (*). Tripod was a space that was difficult for the Malaysian government to censor while being easy to hold discussions.2

And so we reach the "cute cat theory": the ideal places for those who suddenly have important, politically sensitive material they want to share are sites designed for sharing videos and pictures of "cute cats" (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr). These sites are easy to use, have a wide reach, and are difficult to censor – if the government shuts them down it annoys a lot of people and alerts them that something interesting is going on. "Cute cats" sites are natural tinder boxes for revolutionary sparks.

The events EZ recounts are compelling, but a lot of compelling things happen in this strange world, so my first thoughts whenever I hear a story of the Internet producing some unique chain of events is: can I think of a non-Internet example that matches? So here is the lunch-room theory of political dissent (details from here).

3 Polish lunch rooms

On July 8, 1980, in the lunch room at a transport equipment plant in the eastern Polish town of Swidnik, the price of a pork cutlet jumped from 10.20 zloty to 18.10. For Miroslaw Kaczan, this jump was the final straw, and after lunch he switched off the machines he was working on. Others in Department 320 joined him, and other departments in the factory were quick to join. Soon there was a factory-wide stoppage, and it wasn't just about pork cutlets: the demands of the protesters revealed a wealth of pent-up frustration.

News about the strike in Swidnik spread so quickly that within two weeks 50,000 people in the region were on strike. This wave of strikes was resolved on July 25, but the disruption was far from over: three weeks later the strikes at the Gdansk ship yards in northern Poland started, and within a year Solidarnosc had over 9 million members.

In the early days of the strikes, Poles had a hunger for news of the protests, of course, and despite the heavy censorship of official media they found them, through short-wave radio broadcasts from other countries.

So the lunch-room theory is not that different from the cute-cat theory, except that there's no Internet. People gather wherever they gather for their everyday conversations and interactions, and it is in these everyday places that a spark of frustration can catch fire. And once it does catch fire, a combination of broadcast media and a networked public spreads the news quickly.

Perhaps, the Polish example shows, the Internet is not essential for the spark to turn into a fire. Perhaps a digitally networked public is not the only networked public.

4 Tunisia's Second Act

Even in Tunisia, politically sensitive material for which there is a high demand has found its way through dangerous pathways to reach a public desperate for news.

In a long piece called Streetbook (*) John Pollock interviews two members of an underground Tunisian group called Takriz [update: see Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York's comments below for reservations about Streetbook]. One of these "Taks" describes how the video that "made the second half of the [Tunisian] revolution" was taken when the regime had shut down the Internet, so "Takriz smuggled a CD of the video over the Algerian border" before forwarding it to Al Jazeera. YouTube may make it it easier and safer to make videos available (at least so long as Google lets it be done anonymously), but when an important video was available, the Internet was not essential to the process of distribution.

5 Media Ecology or Network Ecology?

If we are really going to talk about a "media ecology" in the sense EZ means, we need to include all those gathering places–online and offline–which are difficult to shut down precisely because of their everyday, general purpose role. In addition to Facebook and YouTube we need to include factory lunchrooms, mosques and churches, football stadia (*), universities, popular music (*), balconies (*), and more.

All these share a number of properties with Cute Cats sites. They are difficult to shut down without annoying large numbers of previously quiescent people, they are difficult to monitor in detail because of the dispersed and varied nature of the interactions that go on, and they are already familiar places for the gathering and sharing of information. EZ says that "we don't take these 'cute cat tools' seriously enough. These tools that anyone can use, that are used 99% of the time for completely banal purposes" but he doesn't take offline everyday institutions for banal sharing seriously enough.

EZ's mistake is the achilles heel of social media advocates. Talk of a "networked society" is justified by comparing today's digitally connected populations to a population of couch potatoes watching prime time TV, but such a comparison overlooks all those other institutions of public networking. Instead of talking of a "media ecology" we should be talking of a "network ecology": the intricate tapestry of multiple networking institutions and practices that makes up a society.

Do digital social media supplement other networking instutions or displace them? There has been a lot of work on this at the individual level, but it's much more difficult to evaluate on a societal level. It is possible that digital social media increase the richness of social networks in a society, but it's also possible (likely?) that digital social media are the kudzu of networks, thriving while they strangle the other components of a rich and diverse network ecology; the best network left standing in an impoverished environment.

Footnotes

1 Among other things, Sami ben Gharbia is author of a fantastic essay on The Internet Freedom Fallacy and Arab Digital Activism (*)

2 In fact it may not have been so much that the site was difficult to censor, as that Malaysian government had decided to exclude the Internet as a whole from its otherwise-strict censorship rules (*).

January 02, 2012

Table of Contents

Avoiding Cynicism (As If)

Peering into the New Year, my better half Lynne reflected yesterday that it is a duty of each of us, as we grow older, to be vigilant against encroaching cynicism. She's right (of course!), and I do feel that strong and steady current tugging me sluggishly downstream towards the lazy, easy waters of geezerhood, to a place where everything new shows itself only by its flaws and in which every new glass is basically empty.

Luckily, 2012 looks like being a banner year for those of us who take a critical view of the hype and commercialization around digital technology, so I'm actually feeling quite cheery. The number of digital hecklers is growing1, and will continue to do so as the relations between the mainstream Internet and its audience/members sours. A growing wave of disenchantment is gathering enough steam [sic] to become a creative force in its own right, and I think that's going to be fascinating to watch, as well as potentially a period of renewal for alternative culture.

So Happy New Year, and here are a few predictions for 2012. I don't think the full impact of any will be over and done during the calendar year, but I do think we'll look back at 2012 as a turning point in attitudes to digital technologies.

Facebook: Privacy Hits the Mainstream

Prediction

High-profile privacy cases in 2012 will dramatically accelerate the level of public distrust in Facebook, which will spill over to other Internet aggregators.

Privacy has always been the other side of the openness coin. Everyone loves openness, of course, but the last year or two has made it clear that behind Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile (*) claim that "I'm trying to make the world a more open place" there is a hard, cold, commercial reality. Are we sharing among each other, or are we feeding Facebook? And where is the boundary between the two?

Here's a dilemma my son faces, which also confronts many other young people. After university one potential employer is the Canadian government. If he clicks his support on Facebook for political protests, will government background checks have access to this information and will it count against him? There's no point asking Facebook even if you did trust it, because today's terms and conditions may change, and the laws governing it may change too. From being an open space where it is easy to express our political views, Facebook is becoming a panopticon where we censor ourselves, not knowing who is watching.

It's not clear that the advertising driven model of web technology is sustainable given its dependence on data that we are increasingly reluctant to give up. As ex-Facebook engineer Jeff Hammerbacher says, "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks." We've lived with this downside until now but as the choices become more stark this may change, and when things change on the Internet, they can change very quickly. danah boyd's view that "Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated" (*) will become mainstream. We'll see demands2 for changes to Facebook's practices (see the Europe vs Facebook group (*), and the Irish data protection commissioner's report here) gaining momentum.

Amazon: Abusing Community

Prediction

Change in the open source world as Google takes on Amazon.

Amazon is rapidly making a name for itself as the company to give the Internet a bad name. From brutal working conditions (*) to treating physical bookstores as showrooms (*) to union-bashing (*) to McCarthyist policies around Wikileaks (*) to tax opposition (*) to screwing libraries (*), this company has done everything it can to demolish the image of the Internet as a source of cooperation, collaboration, and open friendship. It has perfected the act of free-riding on open source efforts, building its (remarkable, it must be said) profitable EC2 infrastructure on Xen Hypervisor, using Linux extensively, and not contributing back (*), in the same way it happily takes all those volunteer hours put into Wikipedia and uses them to sell its own devices, messing with authors' rights as it does so (*).

The Kindle Fire is the icing on the cake: Amazon has taken the Android operating system and its Linux kernel and used it to power the Amazon tablet. In doing so, it has taken Google's language of openness around Android (always suspect) and thrown it right back in Google's face, removing the Google applications and most evidence that the device is running Android, and making it an Amazon device from end to end.

With the Kindle Fire looking likely to become the top selling Android tablet, you have to wonder how long Google will welcome this state of affairs. There's a lot of talk about the rivalry between Google and Apple, but the tension between Google and Amazon is the conflict that may change the open source world. The licensing terms for open source software have been increasingly friendly to commercial exploitation of community projects, moving steadily away from the more restrictive GPL (*), and Amazon's nose-thumbing may be the step that forces a re-evaluation of this enterprise-friendly stance.

Apple: Stepping in Front of Google

Prediction

As the open web fragments, Google will look to its bottom line.

Speaking of Google, Apple's voice control system Siri may be the biggest threat the friendly ad-broker has yet faced, and you could argure that Siri is the major threat to the openness of the web.

It's increasingly obvious that the web has several natural bottlenecks, and that these bottlenecks are simultaneously the places where money can be made and chokepoints where political pressure can be applied. Ever since broadband and mobile access replaced ye olde dialup and Internet access became dominated by telcos and cable companies, ISPs have been one set of bottlenecks. Mobile device makers are another. The DNS system itself is yet another, which SOPA is looking to squeeze. Finally, there is aggregation, Silicon Valley's preferred source of influence.

Aggregation creates a single point of entry into a part of the web, whether it's aggregating consumer items (Amazon), digital products (Apple), people (Facebook), or the web itself (Google), and aggregation is driven by increasing returns to scale. The point of aggregators is to stand between us and what we want to reach, guiding us to those parts of it that seem best.

The thing about Siri is that it stands in front of Google, potentially displacing the search box as iPhone users' point of entry to the web. Just as removal from Google's search engine makes you vanish from the web, so Siri has the potential to make Google vanish. Well, not vanish in the short term, but fade at least. Apple negotiates deals with providers like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha, doing an end run around the PageRank algorithm.

If Siri and other voice-recognition "assistants" move towards the mainstream, we can expect to experience an increasingly curated/censored version of the web (*). The relationship between Apple and the anti-establishment has always been love-hate, and Siri may drive it into hate-hate.

Google's friendly image can last only so long as its growth rate and profit margins stay healthy. It's already lost the aura of being the place to be for programmers, soon we'll soon see enough competition to force Google into a more orthodox stance, and that will shock a lot of observers.

Footnotes:

1 A few years ago Andrew Keen's silly "Cult of the Amateur" was the most prominent digital criticism book. Now we have Zittrain ("The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It"), Carr ("The Shallows"), Turkle ("Alone Together"), Wu ("The Master Switch"), Lanier ("You Are Not a Gadget") and many more.